Global Lounge presents: Reframing Waterscapes

About the exhibit
Reframing Waterscapes explores experiences of migration in the Yangtze River basin after the building of the Three Gorges Dam (TGD), the world’s largest hydroelectric dam. Since construction began in 1994, over fourteen thousand hectares of agricultural land have been submerged, including 100 towns and archeological sites. According to official figures, 1.3 million people have been displaced although unofficial estimates place the number much higher. In addition to human displacement, massive landslides and related dam pollution has resulted in an array of ecological ills. How should we understand these vast social, economic, political and ecological transformations? What role does art, as well as interdisciplinary collaborations between artists and researchers, play in advancing such understandings?

This exhibit is drawn from on an 1800 km journey along the Yangtze River from Chongqing to Shanghai taken by multi-media artist Gu Xiong and research collaborators Chris Lee and Jennifer Chun in 2011. A series of public events in conjunction with the exhibit will further explore waterways as metaphors for displacement, survival, and renewal.

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About the artist
Gu Xiong is Professor in the Department of Art History, Visual Art, and Theory at UBC. A multi-media artist from China who now lives in Canada, Gu works with painting, drawing, printmaking, sculpture, photography, video, digital imagery, text, performance art, and installation. He has exhibited nationally and internationally, including more than 35 solo exhibitions and three public art commissions. Much of Gu Xiong’s work focuses on the dynamics of globalization and on identity shifts for individuals and local cultures; he addresses integration and assimilation, histories both collective and personal, and cultural synthesis across boundaries. “Waterscapes,” a SSHRC-funded research creation project, seeks to integrate community- engaged visual arts production and migration research to rethink the spatial logics of contemporary global migrations.

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About the researchers
Chris Lee is Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Associate Principal at St. John’s College at UBC. His areas of teaching and research include Asian diaspora literatures and cultures, Asian Canadian Studies, critical and literary theory, and aesthetic philosophy. His book, “The Semblance of Identity: Aesthetic Meditation in Asian American Literature,” will be published by Stanford University Press in 2012.

Jennifer Jihye Chun is Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Faculty Associate at the Liu Institute for Global Issues at UBC. Her research interests are animated by questions about the dynamics of power, inequality and social change under global capitalism. In particular, her research explores the changing worlds of work and labour politics for immigrant and women workers. Her book, “Organizing at the Margins: The Symbolic Politics of Labor in South Korea and the United States” was published by Cornell University Press in 2009.

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About the films
A Moth in Spring, directed and written by Yu Gu, mixes narrative, experimental, and actual footage to create a very personal documentary that explores themes of exile, art and family. While attempting to produce a film in China about the departure of her father Gu Xiong after the 1989 Student Democracy Movement, the young filmmaker’s life and work quickly begin to parallel her father’s experiences when filming is shut down by China’s National Security Bureau and she is ordered to leave the country. A Moth In Spring is a rare and intimate look at the challenges to artistic freedom in China. Yu discovers that the desire for freedom of speech is a force that unites three generations of her family, spanning China and North America.

Every spring, China’s cities are plunged into chaos, as all at once, a tidal wave of humanity attempts to return home by train. It is the Chinese New Year. The wave is made up of millions of migrant workers. The homes they seek are in rural villages with the families they left behind in order to seek work in the booming coastal cities. It is an epic spectacle that tells us much about China, a country discarding traditional ways as it hurtles towards modernity and global economic dominance. Last Train Home, an emotionally engaging and visually beautiful debut film from Chinese-Canadian director Lixin Fan, draws us into the fractured lives of a single migrant family caught up in this desperate annual migration.

Seen through the eyes of activists, farmers, and journalists Waking the Green Tiger follows an extraordinary campaign to stop a huge dam project on the upper Yangtze river in southwestern China. Featuring astonishing archival footage never seen outside China, and interviews with a government insider and witnesses, the documentary also tells the history of Chairman Mao’s campaigns to conquer nature in the name of progress. An environmental movement takes root when a new environmental law is passed and for the first time in China’s history, ordinary citizens have the democratic right to speak out and take part in government decisions. Activists test their freedom and save a river. The movement they trigger has the potential to transform China.

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